Using social engineering to hack into systems

Hacking is a form of black art. The malicious types of hackers are even referred to as “black hat” vs the “white hat” hackers who look for vulnerabilities for altruistic reasons instead of malicious. Put differently, “black hat” vs “white hat” is a sort of throwback to the old western movies where the bad guys always wore black hats and the good guys wore white/light colored ones.

Continuing with the movie theme, hackers are often depicted sitting in front of a computer intently staring at the screen while he or she is furiously banging away at keys on the keyboard and many, many things are happening on the display. A few short minutes or seconds later he or she loudly proclaims that the system has been penetrated and the world is at their fingertips. While the above is far from how hacking is typically done the reality is that there are individuals and organizations with malicious intentions regularly attempting to infiltrate systems they don’t have permissions to.

Leveraging a whiz kid(or an entire team of them) whose primary language is computer code is one way. Another method leverages a tactic commonly referred to as social engineering. Put differently, it’s a way to manipulate someone who has access or the ability to grant access to the data the black hat wants access to. This video is a fantastic example of how easily it can be done by leveraging people skills:

If your company stores information that can be deemed sensitive it is crucial to have security processes in place that customer service reps stick to with absolutely zero room for deviation.

The above is just one of the reasons many customer service departments record all phone calls. Be informed, it’s becoming more important than ever. Contact us via our site, give us a call at 803.955.7737 or send us a message on Twitter @spestech to see how we can help.